![]() ![]() “Born of Man and Woman” (1950) is told from the perspective of a monstrous child chained to the basement wall by its equally monstrous parents, who routinely beat the child when it tries to escape. ![]() Matheson’s writing career began with short stories.Ī year after graduating with a journalism degree from the University of Missouri, Matheson’s first short story was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. “During basic training,” he later recalled, “I would go down to the latrine at night while other soldiers were sleeping, and I would sit there reading Dracula … never knowing I was gonna write a book about vampires.” His experience of fighting in Europe during WWII served as the basis for his war novel The Beardless Warriors (1960). ![]() Matheson joined the army after graduating high school in 1943. Matheson was a published writer before even having this career defining idea, though he was only 8 when he had a poem printed in the Brooklyn Eagle. In a 2012 speech accepting the Vampire Novel of the Century Award, he remembered that “the thought occurred to me: if one vampire is scary, what if the whole world were full of vampires?” But, he said, “at least 10 years” passed before he took that seed of inspiration and began work on I Am Legend. Matheson, who was born in 1926, saw Bela Lugosi as Bram Stoker’s infamous blood-sucker when he was a teenager. ![]() Bela Lugosi and Helen Chandler in 'Dracula.' / United Archives/GettyImages ![]()
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